American Studies
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Item The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care(2024) Hofmann, Anne Elizabeth; Guerrero, Perla; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care" is an institutional ethnography that investigates the personal, political, and economic costs to student caregivers seeking a college degree. Through a critical analysis of student interviews and a close examination of community college structures and histories, I deploy an interdisciplinary, qualitative methodology that seeks to topple and contest previous ways of researching two-year collegiate structures in the U.S. I argue that, internally, community colleges offer intermittent respites from the physical and emotional labor of caregiving by being locations of intellectual invigoration and professionalization for students; however, I also address how community colleges’ positioning within larger regional and global political economies ultimately renders them stations of stagnation for many students, especially those with the most overlapping needs and markers of difference. To analyze these concepts, I use an interpretive framework that threads theories of disinvestment, structural exclusion, and predatory inclusion, to explore the use of the term “care,” which is used flexibly across institutional and everyday life to recruit students and animate collegiate recruiting and retention initiatives. I trace the link between two-year schools’ reputation as both places of “opportunity” and “second chances,” and as a stigmatized alternative to “real college.” I do so by examining the language and visual arguments deployed by colleges’ public-facing websites, as situated within broader historical-political narratives about community colleges, and by conducting in-depth interviews with caregiving students. I find that political and popular beliefs regarding studenthood and care work are internalized by students, particularly those with the fewest financial and time resources. Additionally, the overlap between race, gender, and unpaid care work aligns with those students who are the least likely to graduate from college and the most likely to accrue significant debt and physical or mental distress due to their attempts. The study triangulates institutional histories, neoliberal rhetorics of education and success, and student caregiver testimony to conclude that unpaid care labor for biological or chosen family is simultaneously a primary barrier, a fundamental source of personal joy, and a possible location of subversive power for community college students seeking a post-secondary credential.Item Sunday Morning Matters: The Production of Gendered Subjects in White Evangelical Life(2021) Michael, Kelsey Sherrod; Wong, Janelle; Padios, Jan; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As evangelical Christian demographics in the United States have increasingly diversified, pundits and scholars have sought to understand the persistent political power of white American evangelicals. This interdisciplinary dissertation argues that a key mechanism of the political formation of white evangelical Christians has been hiding in plain sight: The weekly church worship service in predominantly white congregations has provided remarkable continuity as a means of political formation for churchgoers, particularly through worship rituals indebted to ideologies of gender and race. Drawing on Black feminist thought, phenomenology, and the anthropology of religion, I describe the white evangelical church worship service as an axis of “haunting” across time and space, where patriarchal relations of power built on racialized discourses of manhood and womanhood continue to shape the everyday lives of churchgoing women. I rely on textual analysis of evangelical digital culture and original ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, with churchgoing women in the southern U.S. to uncover how women’s experiences in church structure their consciousness in dimensions of their lives not often considered inherently “religious”—work and labor, sex and marriage, performance and material culture, and the knowledge and discipline of the self. In clarifying this phenomenological process by which churchgoing women become gendered and therefore political subjects, the project identifies the significance of the white evangelical church worship service to white evangelical subject formation and the implication of white supremacy in this process. More broadly, the dissertation calls for a reappraisal of the importance of religious ritual to the construction of identity and difference in and through white American Christianity.Item Becoming Your Labor: Identity, Production, and the "Affects of Labor"(2021) Benitez, Molly; Hanhardt, Christina; Padios, Jan; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Becoming Your Labor: Identity, Production, and the’ Affects of Labor’,” analyzes the role work plays in our lives by focusing on how Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC) and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer (LGBTQ+) trades workers navigate their identity in the workplace and beyond. This project draws on autoethnographic and ethnographic research with LGBTQ+ identified trades workers over a span of six years plus select historical evidence. Bringing together feminist and queer of color critique, affect theory, and theories of work, this dissertation considers what I call the ‘affects of labor’ – the visceral and active consequences of our working environments that metabolize through our bodies and produce our identities, relationships, and communities. “Becoming Your Labor” focuses on the experiences of LGBTQ trades workers in the Pacific Northwest. While focusing on LGBTQ+ and QTBIPoC trades workers, this research emphasizes how the experiences and lessons of a precise group of workers has much to teach us about larger systems of power shape labor, identity, and community. Individual chapters address how workplace culture is created through history, affects, and bodies; how workers implement various strategies for survival; and how these strategies have consequences for workers, their families, and communities. Chapter one delves into the racist and patriarchal foundation of the trades and the culture of abuse, violence, and toxic masculinity, these foundations have fostered. Here I define the ‘affects of labor.’ In chapter 2 my co-creators speak about how they navigate the affects of their labor at work, specifically harassment, bullying, and fear, and the strategies they enact such as ‘wearing a mask,’ changing their physical appearance, and trying to hang with ‘the boys.’ Chapter three addresses what happens when the “affects of labor” that come home with us. In this chapter trades workers describe how their work has had impacts on their home lives due to depression, violence, and addiction. Chapter four pivots from a focus on the “negative” ‘affects of labor’ to their liberatory potential centering on the experiences of workers employed at Repair Revolution, an LGBTQ+ owned and operated automotive repair shop. The project makes two critical interventions: it traces an alternate genealogy for affect theory through feminist and women of color critique; and it offers the ‘affects of labor’ as a new framework to think through how affects do more than stick to, move, or push, but actually produce and reproduce bodies and identities. In an era in which discussions of workplace power and culture have entered the mainstream – from the “Me Too” movement to the popular claim that the problem of police violence rests on “a few bad apples” – this dissertation aims to offer new understandings of the consequences of work and urges us to think more critically about the dialectical process in which workers, their families, and communities are produced by labor.Item Black Gay and Bisexual Men, Internet Access, Memory, and Visual Culture(2021) Jiles, Robert De Von; Bruce, La Marr J; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawing from the fields of visual culture, black queer studies, black feminist theory, internet studies, and affect theory, “Black Gay and Bisexual Men, Internet Access, Memory, and Visual Culture” focuses on black gay and bisexual men who have internet access to create, view, and circulate visual representations about their own experiences and how they challenge, subvert, and reify negative and one-dimensional representations about their lived experiences. The cultural objects analyzed in the dissertation include two episodes from playwright and screenwriter Donja R. Love’s independent scripted web series Modern Day Black Gay and Darius Clark Monroe’s short film Slow. Both cultural objects were released for online viewing and can be accessed for free. As Black queer visual culture, Slow and MDBG trouble a racial and heteronormative visual field that renders black gay and bisexual men as excess. Tapping into affects such as desire, intimacy, love and pleasure, Love and Monroe use memory in the cultural objects to create visual images from the excess. In turn, the cultural objects stimulate black gay and bisexual viewers’ memories, and activate affective encounters occur Slow and MDBG use visual images to interrogate and reinscribe notions about black sexuality, black masculinity, black family and community, black love, same-sex romance, and black religion. This dissertation investigates the relationship between artists, the art objects, and the viewers and look for meaning in their creation, representation and interpretations of gay online hookup culture, gender and sexual stereotypes, and conservative homophobic Christian beliefs and practices. In addition to a textual analysis of the cultural objects, methods in the dissertation include interviews, self-ethnography, several small group screenings of the cultural objects by black gay and bisexual male participants, and group discussions following the screenings about the participants' interpretations of the material and how their experiences relate to the cultural texts.